SOURCE: Llewellyn, Dara. “Reader Activation of Boundaries in Kate Chopin's ‘Beyond the Bayou.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 2 (spring 1996): 255-62.

In the following essay, Llewellyn examines Chopin's symbolic use of the physical setting of “Beyond the Bayou.”

Boundaries exist everywhere in the worlds created within short stories and within the experience this genre offers the reader. Generally, we use the word “boundary” in the ordinary sense of demarcation, but I would like to suggest that we use it as a “term of art” in the study of short fiction. Without becoming overly technical, we can borrow from the mathematical notion of boundary as both limit and field. As a beginning I will show how these adjusted definitions give us some new leverage on a particular story by Kate Chopin, and on the nature of storyness itself. “Beyond the Bayou” is a rich illustration because it is about boundaries...